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Comment by alpanka | Hacker News Reader

I suspect this is pretty common.

It is an open secret that Stieg Larsson (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo) was a mediocre writer with no discipline and his girlfriend shaped most of the Millennium books.

(I wish someone could compare his and her books using some fancy AI tool to investigate this).

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Yeah, there has been recent stuff written about how much Einstein's first wife contributed to his work while getting zero credit.

She apparently knew the value of her work too because she had him agree to give her his Nobel Prize winnings as part of the divorce settlement. She got him to promise her this before he won.

She apparently recognized it was Nobel Prize worthy stuff and it seems she saw that as rightly "her" money.

Edited for clarity, typos.

It's commonly claimed that the reason the original Star Wars films were so much better than the prequels was the work of Marcia Lucas in the editing suite.

More likely, it's because Lawrence Kasdan wasn't involved in the writing of the prequels.

It's a lot of things. Prequels are hard to begin with, and Lucas wasn't interested in shooting dialog

These accounts about Marcia are deserved but downplay the contributions of Paul Hirsch and Richard Chew. The three of them absolutely saved Star Wars in the editing room.

The lack of Lawrence Kasdan is the reason that every piece of dialogue in the prequels is incredibly awkward (but apparently extremely meme-able).

An accounting of changes made in the edit of Star Wars: https://youtu.be/GFMyMxMYDNk

Both your and /u/kevinmchugh's response to my comment make good points.

I agree that it's probably pretty common. I thought that Tabatha King, Stephen King's wife, did a lot of work on his novels (but I can't find a link for that right now). The fantasy author Robert Jordan's wife, Harriett McDougal, is an editor and worked with Jordan and others.

That's surprising. Stephen Kings writes at length about his own creative process and habits (he wrote a full book about it, On Writing) and he never mentions Tabitha doing "lots of work" on his novels. He does mention she is an accomplished writer and that he asks her for opinions, but lots of work? Sounds like an urban legend.

Perhaps not now, but probably a bit more work on the novels he can't remember writing due to substance abuse problems.

That's easy: George Stark wrote those. Or maybe Richard Bachman.

You could try reading them.

I have a similar sneaking suspicion about To Kill a Mockingbird.

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